BOOM<\/p>\n
Edmund\u2019s form dissolves. He is howling. His form pales, rips itself away from reality, gelatinizes for a moment, crisp edge around a translucent core \u2014<\/p>\n
But Death is small and the wolf is large.<\/p>\n
Death may not have Fenris\u2019<\/em> Edmund Gulley.<\/p>\n Edmund\u2019s form stabilizes and it resumes its strength. He bats the gun away, he drags Sid to the floor against the edge of Sid\u2019s bed, he is howling; he gapes his maw, he opens it to devour the boy in a single bite, and confusion surges over him in a wave.<\/p>\n He stares at Sid. He cannot figure out how to fit the whole Sid in his mouth at once. Sid appears to be larger than his mouth. He cannot even figure out how to bite a little piece off.<\/p>\n Edmund works his mouth. He rubs puzzledly at his forehead. He tries to remember theorems of geometry.<\/p>\n Edmund can\u2019t remember theorems of geometry!<\/p>\n This is a particular weakness of wolves.<\/p>\n His back crawls. For a moment he thinks it\u2019s a spider and he almost drops Sid to flutter it frantically away, but then he realizes.<\/p>\n \u201cYou,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Them.<\/em><\/p>\n There\u2019s the whispering of clothing behind him. Edmund puts Sid down carefully. He turns. He looks at them.<\/p>\n Them, in their yellow hats.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat are you doing?\u201d he says. \u201cWhy would you stop me? Why? Look at him!\u201d<\/p>\n He\u2019s almost crying.<\/p>\n \u201cLook at him.\u201d<\/p>\n Sid pulls himself up to his feet. He shoots a glance at them. At Fred. At Emily. At Paul. Emily can\u2019t meet his eyes.<\/p>\n \u201cThanks,\u201d says Sid. \u201cThat was a close one! I almost got eaten by that white-eyed boy.\u201d<\/p>\n His voice is amazingly even.<\/p>\n \u201cCome on,\u201d says Edmund.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re not supposed to be in my room,\u201d says Sid.<\/p>\n Edmund hits him. The sound is horrible in the silence.<\/p>\n Then Sid shrugs. He goes over to the closet. He gets his outing coat. He slips past the boys and girls in their yellow hats. His feet crunching, he goes out.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can\u2019t do this,\u201d says Edmund. \u201cWhy would you save him?\u201d<\/p>\n They don\u2019t have answers.<\/p>\n \u201cHe is hurting,\u201d Edmund says. \u201cHe is in such awful chains. He is hurting. Let me free him. You can\u2019t pin me down like this. I\u2019m Edmund Gulley. I\u2019ll have you all expelled.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n He can almost hear them talking. Almost. It\u2019s like watching birds through a camera and knowing that they\u2019re twittering amongst themselves.<\/p>\n \u201cI can make this stop,\u201d<\/em> Edmund pleads.<\/p>\n \u201cHell with this,\u201d says Emily.<\/p>\n The others\u2019 attention turns from him with a snap. It\u2019s like being pressed to the ground under a giant, heavy metal plate that someone has suddenly removed, or like having a bunch of people standing in a creepy semicircle staring at you suddenly turn away and stare at one of their own instead.<\/p>\n Which is, in fact, what they\u2019ve just done.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat?\u201d Emily says. She makes faces at them. \u201cWhat? Hell with this. Hell with everything! I can\u2019t do this any more. Better he did<\/em> eat him. What are we fighting for? What are we fighting for, life bought with this?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n She is still making faces at them. They are utterly quiet.<\/p>\n \u201cDon\u2019t look at me like that.\u201d<\/p>\n Edmund moves.<\/p>\n She squeaks as he comes at her. She focuses on him. Her eyes flash with fear, regret, remorse, and gold. But she is just a moment too late.<\/p>\n The others are turning on him again. But they are just a moment too late as well.<\/p>\n He shatters her with his eyes.<\/p>\n He knocks her down. He leaps past her out the door. He turns. He glares.<\/p>\n They try to hold, but they do not hold. Before his glare, they scatter; they dissipate; they dissolve into the hallways of the Lethal Magnet School for Wayward Youth like gusts of wind. They leave Emily there, on the floor, clawing feebly for her hat, and they do not stop Edmund as he chases after Sid.<\/p>\n Sid turns at the end of a hallway. He sees Edmund coming up from behind him.<\/p>\n He punches through a glass case on the wall beside him.<\/p>\n He takes out a fire axe.<\/p>\n Edmund is a blur.<\/p>\n Sid looks at the axe for a moment. He seems mildly confused. He swallows. He leans his tongue out towards the blade.<\/p>\n You shouldn\u2019t do this, by the way. The first thing to do is to take the glass bits out of your hand. Then, without<\/em> licking the fire axe, use it to defend yourself from the attacking Edmund-beast!<\/p>\n I mean, obviously, it\u2019s possible <\/em>that if you just lick the axe in circumstances like that you will get a pony; or everything will end in a beautiful, happy ending; or you will become a magical, inescapable Prince.<\/p>\n But this probably isn\u2019t what would actually happen.<\/p>\n Sid doesn\u2019t quite manage to lick the axe, either way. It is knocked from his hand and he is knocked back and his eyes follow it and there is an overpowering sense of loss in them; and then \u2014<\/p>\n White.<\/em><\/p>\n It surges. It fills his field of view.<\/p>\n Edmund\u2019s hunger drowns out Sid\u2019s vision. His heart catches in his throat. His mouth and his nose go dry. He is still moving, he thinks, he may even still be fighting<\/em>, but he cannot see.<\/em><\/p>\n He cannot hear.<\/p>\n He cannot taste.<\/p>\n He wonders if he is dead now. He wonders if Edmund has killed him; if this is what it means to be eaten by the House of Hunger, that one falls forever in the great hungry white.<\/p>\n He wonders if the world still exists, without him.<\/p>\n He wonders what it would actually mean, to be alive.<\/p>\n And in that nothingness he reaches for himself and he cannot find himself. He is suddenly dual, the Sid that is <\/em>and the Sid that is seen.<\/em> He reaches for the self that accepted the burden of Torment; the self willing to be like that, live like that, that something beautiful, something amazing could be born.<\/p>\n That the world could live just more day, even.<\/p>\n It is gone.<\/p>\n Edmund has ripped it out of him. He\u2019s devoured it.<\/p>\n Sid remembers his name. It\u2019s Sid Sidwell. He is crying and covered in wounds. Wounds, and ripped clothes, and two unhappy spiders.<\/p>\n The burden of Torment is gone.<\/p>\n It has left him alone.<\/p>\n It is as if a clear full-body cast has been stripped from him, and now his body is free to bend, to curl, to reject the world, to become small.<\/p>\n And he still thinks, \u2014<\/p>\n It occurs to him after a while that he still thinks what he was doing was for the best. He could<\/em> still do it. He could still \u2014<\/p>\n He looks at the axe. He licks his lips. He could still be the sacrifice the world requires \u2014<\/p>\n Only, he can\u2019t.<\/p>\n He\u2019s not strong enough. He doesn\u2019t even \u2014<\/p>\n He admits this to himself. He is ashamed of it, but he doesn\u2019t even want<\/em> to be strong enough again. He doesn\u2019t want to go back to that.<\/p>\n Oh, God.<\/em><\/p>\n What he wants is for the pain to stop.<\/p>\n He can feel the world beginning to crack.<\/p>\n His head is pounding. He can barely breathe. So he scrawls out a pentagram in his blood on the floor. He marks the edges of it with runes. With a will that has become so much as iron that the dizziness barely touches him, he summons up half a thing to clean him and to tend his wounds and brush away the spiders, and to carry him off to the infirmary where he can rest.<\/p>\n As for the other half, he doesn\u2019t know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" BOOM Edmund\u2019s form dissolves. He is howling. His form pales, rips itself away from reality, gelatinizes for a moment, crisp edge around a translucent core \u2014 But Death is small and the wolf is large. Death may not have Fenris\u2019 Edmund Gulley. Edmund\u2019s form stabilizes and it resumes its strength. He bats the gun away, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5273,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[],"series":[50],"class_list":["post-5764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-vidars-boot-chapter-9","series-vidars-boot"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/Hat_4_nobg.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5764"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5764\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6009,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5764\/revisions\/6009"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5764"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fseries&post=5764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}